That’s right! Metroid: Other M was released for the Nintendo Wii in North America on August 31st, 2010. It was the first Japan-made Metroid game since Zero Mission, and was developed by a group calling themselves “Project M”, consisting of members from Nintendo, Team Ninja (Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden), and D-Rockets (cutscenes).

It was developed, published, and written by a long-haired Japanese hippy named Yoshio Sakamoto, a man who also directed every Metroid game excluding the original NES game (I incorrectly state that he had in the first video) and Metroid II: Return of Samus. He also supervised each of the Metroid Prime games. The guy actually has a pretty extensive repertoire for Nintendo games.

Metroid: Other M was first announced at E3 2009, to much hype and high expectations. The game looked gorgeous, the audio was great, and the gameplay looked…different, but doable. We were promised an engaging storyline taking us further into Samus as a character; ground that had never been tread before. All we knew about Samus, as a character, up to that point, was that she liked to leave exotic planets by blowing them up.

Critical reception of the game was extremely polar after the game came out. Critics praised the graphics, music, atmosphere, controls, and just the whole general feel of the game. And a lot of people would agree: it looks very pretty (especially for a Wii game) and the music is very good and all that jazz. But the plot and the characterization have people split, with more people hating it than liking it.

Commercially, the game was either a raging success or a limp flop, depending on your region. It sold 50,000 copies in two weeks in Japan and was the third-best-selling game the week of its release. In America, it sold 173,000 units in September, though “less than half a million” by November of the same year, which was far below what Nintendo was anticipating.

Original Archived Let's Play available at the Let's Play Archive

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